Download or read book The Book of Laughter and Forgetting written by Milan Kundera and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2023-03-28 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An absolutely dazzling entertainment. . . . Arousing on every level—political, erotic, intellectual, and above all, humorous." —Newsweek "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting calls itself a novel, although it is part fairy tale, part literary criticism, part political tract, part musicology, and part autobiography. It can call itself whatever it wants to, because the whole is genius." —New York Times Rich in its stories, characters, and imaginative range, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is the novel that brought Milan Kundera his first big international success in the late 1970s. Like all his work, it is valuable for far more than its historical implications. In seven wonderfully integrated parts, different aspects of human existence are magnified and reduced, reordered and emphasized, newly examined, analyzed, and experienced.
Download or read book Immortality written by Milan Kundera and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 1999-10-20 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Milan Kundera's sixth novel springs from a casual gesture of a woman to her swimming instructor, a gesture that creates a character in the mind of a writer named Kundera. Like Flaubert's Emma or Tolstoy's Anna, Kundera's Agnes becomes an object of fascination, of indefinable longing. From that character springs a novel, a gesture of the imagination that both embodies and articulates Milan Kundera's supreme mastery of the novel and its purpose; to explore thoroughly the great, themes of existence.
Download or read book The JOKE written by Milan Kundera and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 1993-02-26 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: All too often, this brilliant novel of thwarted love and revenge miscarried has been read for its political implications. Now, a quarter century after The Joke was first published and several years after the collapse of the Soviet-imposed Czechoslovak regime, it becomes easier to put such implications into perspective in favor of valuing the book (and all Kundera 's work) as what it truly is: great, stirring literature that sheds new light on the eternal themes of human existence. The present edition provides English-language readers an important further means toward revaluation of The Joke. For reasons he describes in his Author's Note, Milan Kundera devoted much time to creating (with the assistance of his American publisher-editor) a completely revised translation that reflects his original as closely as any translation possibly can: reflects it in its fidelity not only to the words and syntax but also to the characteristic dictions and tonalities of the novel's narrators. The result is nothing less than the restoration of a classic.
Download or read book Slowness written by Milan Kundera and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2023-04-25 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Irresistible. . . . Slowness is an ode to sensuous leisure, to the enjoyment of pleasure rather than just the search for it." — Mirabella Milan Kundera's lightest novel, a divertimento, an opera buffa, Slowness is also the first of this author's fictional works to have been written in French. Disconcerted and enchanted, the reader follows the narrator of Slowness through a midsummer's night in which two tales of seduction, separated by more than two hundred years, interweave and oscillate between the sublime and the comic. Underlying this libertine fantasy is a profound meditation on contemporary life: about the secret bond between slowness and memory, about the connection between our era's desire to forget and the way we have given ourselves over to the demon of speed. And about "dancers" possessed by the passion to be seen, for whom life is merely a perpetual show emptied of every intimacy and every joy.
Download or read book Farewell Waltz written by Milan Kundera and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2023-05-23 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "After Farewell Waltz there cannot be any doubt. Kundera is a master of contemporary literature. This novel is both an an example of virtuosity and a descent into the human soul." —L'Unite Set in an old-fashioned Central European spa town, Farewell Waltz poses the most serious questions with a blasphemous lightness that makes us see that the modern world has deprived us even of the right to tragedy. In this dark farce of a novel, eight characters are swept up in an accelerating dance: a pretty nurse and her repairman boyfriend; an oddball gynecologist; a rich American (at once saint and Don Juan); a popular trumpeter and his beautiful, obsessively jealous wife; and an disillusioned former political prisoner about to leave his country and his young woman ward. It is perhaps the most brilliantly plotted and sheer entertaining of Milan Kundera's novels. Written in Bohemia in 1969-70, the book was first published (in 1976) in France under the title La valse aux adieux (Farewell Waltz), and later in thirty-four other countries. This beautiful translation, made from the French text prepared by the novelist himself, fully reflects Kundera's own tone and intentions, and offers an opportunity for both the discovery and the rediscovery of one of the very best of a great writer's works.
Download or read book The Unbearable Lightness of Being written by Milan Kundera and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2023-03-28 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Far more than a conventional novel. It is a meditation on life, on the erotic, on the nature of men and women and love . . . full of telling details, truths large and small, to which just about every reader will respond.” — People In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera tells the story of two couples, a young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing, and one of his mistresses and her humbly faithful lover. In a world in which lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and by fortuitous events, a world in which everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence, we feel "the unbearable lightness of being" not only as the consequence of our pristine actions but also in the public sphere, and the two inevitably intertwine. This magnificent novel is a story of passion and politics, infidelity and ideas, and encompasses the extremes of comedy and tragedy, illuminating all aspects of human existence.
Download or read book Such Small Hands written by Andrés Barba and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shirley Jackson meets The Virgin Suicides, set at an all-girls orphanage.
Download or read book Encounter written by Milan Kundera and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2010-08-17 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Milan Kundera's collection of essays is a defense of the arts in an era that, he argues, no longer values art or beauty. --From publisher description.
Download or read book Identity written by Milan Kundera and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2023-04-25 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Kundera, master of the twosome, finds erotic and existential threads everywhere in daily behavior. Like his previous books, Identity is a cluster of jeweled observations. . . . But Identity has a special charm: suspense. . . . [It] gets us turning the pages in excitement and alarm, and Kundera's wit keeps us turning them to the very end." — San Francisco Chronicle In a narrative as intense as it is brief, a moment of confusion sets in motion a complex chain of events which forces the reader to cross and recross the divide between fantasy and reality. Sometimes—perhaps only for an instant—we fail to recognize a companion; for a moment their identity ceases to exist, and thus we come to doubt our own. The effect is at its most acute in a couple, where our existence is given meaning by our perception of a lover, and theirs of us. With his astonishing skill at building on and out from the significant moment, Milan Kundera has placed such a situation and the resulting wave of panic at the core of this novel. Hailed as a "a fervent and compelling romance, a moving fable about the anxieties of love and separateness" (Baltimore Sun), it is not to be missed.
Download or read book Ignorance written by Milan Kundera and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2023-05-23 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Kundera once more delivers a seductive, intelligent entertainment … [with] elegance and grace.” — Washington Post Book World “Nothing short of masterful.” — Newsweek A brilliant novel set in contemporary Prague, by one of the most distinguished writers of our time. A man and a woman meet by chance while returning to their homeland, which they had abandoned 20 years earlier when they chose to become exiles. Will they manage to pick up the thread of their strange love story, interrupted almost as soon as it began and then lost in the tides of history? The truth is that after such a long absence “their memories no longer match.” We always believe that our memories coincide with those of the person we loved, that we experienced the same thing. But this is just an illusion. Only those who return after 20 years, like Ulysses returning to his native Ithaca, can be dazzled and astounded by observing the goddess of ignorance first-hand. Kundera is the only author today who can take dizzying concepts such as absence, memory, forgetting, and ignorance, and transform them into material for a novel, masterfully orchestrating them into a polyphonic and moving work.
Download or read book Jacques and His Master written by Milan Kundera and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2023-07-18 with total page 94 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A deliciously witty and entertaining "variation" on Diderot's novel Jacques le Fatalist, written for Milan Kundera's "private pleasure" in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia. When the "heavy Russian irrationality" fell on Czechoslovakia, Milan Kundera explains, he felt drawn to the spirit of the eighteenth century—"And it seemed to me that nowhere was it to be found more densely concentrated than in that banquet of intelligence, humor, and fantasy, Jacques le Fataliste." The upshot was this "Homage to Diderot," which has now been performed throughout the United States and Europe. Here, Jacques and His Master, newly translated by Simon Callow, is a text that will delight Kundera's admirers throughout the English-speaking world.
Download or read book Testaments Betrayed written by Milan Kundera and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2023-06-27 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A defense of fiction and a lesson in the art of reading." —New York Times Book Review "Testaments Betrayed is to be savored paragraph by paragraph. . . . It must be purchased, read, pondered, and argued within the margins. And frequently reread." — Washington Post A brilliant and thought-provoking essay from one of the twentieth century’s masters of fiction, Testaments Betrayed is written like a novel: the same characters appear and reappear throughout the nine parts of the book, as do the principal themes that preoccupy the author. Kundera is a passionate defender of the moral rights of the artist and the respect due a work of art and its creator’s wishes. The betrayal of both—often by their most passionate proponents—is one of the key ideas that informs this strikingly original and elegant book.
Download or read book The Night Burns Bright written by Ross Barkan and published by Lake Union Publishing. This book was released on 2022-02 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this coming-of-age thriller, a twelve-year-old boy's spark of courage to question the harmonious wooded commune he calls home may burn down more than just his own illusions. Lucien has everything he needs: a loving mama, a library full of books, and House of Earth, a private school nestled safely in the woods of upstate New York. It's where Lucien is taught the importance of living in harmony with nature and building a peaceful and sustainable future. But when his youthful curiosity draws him into town and to Gabrielle, a public-school student living a life wholly different from his own, Lucien's inquisitiveness about life beyond the commune and questions regarding the events of 9/11 threaten to unbalance everything he thought he knew. Slowly, things begin to change at House of Earth. The outside world is off limits. Security measures tighten. New rules are put in place, and anyone who violates them is asked to leave and never spoken of again. As forbidden questions pile up, Lucien's willingness to obey weakens. Continuing to meet Gabrielle in secret only reinforces his gnawing fear that something about his world is terribly wrong. Unable to remain silent any longer, Lucien will soon discover that looking for answers at House of Earth may be the most dangerous rule he can break.
Download or read book Let the Old Dead Make Room for the New Dead written by Milan Kundera and published by Faber Stories. This book was released on 2019-10-17 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A chance encounter leads a man to spend the afternoon with an older woman, now a widow, who escaped him fifteen years earlier. Neither of them doubts that the day will end in disgust, but for one intimate moment each finds a way to overcome mortality. Written in 1969, before Milan Kundera was known to English-speaking readers, this story renders male and female characters painful equals, and prompted Philip Roth to admire its 'detached Chekhovian tenderness'.
Download or read book The Art of the Novel written by Milan Kundera and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2023-06-27 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Incites us to reflect on fiction and philosophy, knowledge and truth, and brilliantly illustrates the art of the essay.” — The New Republic "Every novelist's work contains an implicit vision of the history of the novel, an idea of what the novel is. I have tried to express the idea of the novel that is inherent in my own novels." — Milan Kundera Kundera brilliantly examines the evolution, construction, and essence of the novel as an art form through the lens of his own work and through the work of such important and diverse figures as Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne, Diderot, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Musil, Kafka, and perhaps the least known of all the great novelists of our time, Hermann Broch. Kundera's discussion of his own work includes his views on the role of historical events in fiction, the meaning of action, and the creation of character in the post-psychological novel.
Download or read book The Festival of Insignificance written by Milan Kundera and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2023-07-18 with total page 94 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Slender but weighty. . . . What is moving about this novel is its embrace of what has always driven Kundera, the delicate state of living between being and nothingness.”— Boston Globe From the internationally acclaimed, bestselling author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, an entertaining and enchanting novel—"a fitting capstone on an extraordinary career." (Slate) Casting light on the most serious of problems and at the same time saying not one serious sentence; being fascinated by the reality of the contemporary world and at the same time completely avoiding realism—that’s The Festival of Insignificance. Readers who know Milan Kundera’s earlier books know that the wish to incorporate an element of the “unserious” in a novel is not at all unexpected of him. In Immortality, Goethe and Hemingway stroll through several chapters together talking and laughing. And in Slowness, Vera, the author’s wife, says to her husband: “you’ve often told me you meant to write a book one day that would have not a single serious word in it…I warn you: watch out. Your enemies are lying in wait.” Kundera is finally and fully realizing his old aesthetic dream in this novel that we could easily view as a summation of his whole work. A strange sort of summation. Strange sort of epilogue. Strange sort of laughter, inspired by our time, which is comical because it has lost all sense of humor. What more can we say? Nothing. Just read.
Download or read book The Curtain written by Milan Kundera and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2023-07-18 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An elegant, personalized integration of anecdote, analysis, scholarship, memory and speculation. . . . Not since Henry James, perhaps, has a fiction writer examined the process of writing with such insight, authority and range of reference and allusion.” —Russell Banks, New York Times Book Review “A magic curtain, woven of legends, hung before the world. Cervantes sent Don Quixote journeying and tore through the curtain. The world opened before the knight-errant in all the comical nakedness of its prose.” In this thought-provoking, endlessly enlightening, and entertaining essay on the art of the novel, renowned author Milan Kundera suggests that “the curtain” represents a ready-made perception of the world that each of us has—a pre-interpreted world. The job of the novelist, he argues, is to rip through the curtain and reveal what it hides. Here an incomparable literary artist cleverly sketches out his personal view of the history and value of the novel in Western civilization. In doing so, he celebrates a prose form that possesses the unique ability to transcend national and language boundaries in order to reveal some previously unknown aspect of human existence.
